Six poets—Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Burns, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Campbell, John Keats, and Robert Stephen Hawker—probably had milder forms of manic-depressive illness cyclothymia or bipolar II disorder, although Keats and Burns died before it became clear what the ultimate severity and course of their mood disorders would have been.

Manic-depressive illness is relatively common; approximately one person in a hundred will suffer from the more severe form and at least that many again will experience milder variants, such as cyclothymia.

The distinction between full-blown manic-depressive illness and cyclothymic temperament is often an arbitrary one; indeed, almost all medical and scientific evidence argues for including cyclothymia as an integral part of the spectrum of manic-depressive illness.

Cyclothymia and related manic-depressive temperaments are also an integral and important part of the manic-depressive spectrum, and the relationship of predisposing personalities and cyclothymia to the subsequent development of manic-depressive psychosis is fundamental.

These vary in severity from cyclothymia—characterized by pronounced but not totally debilitating changes in mood, behavior, thinking, sleep, and energy levels—to extremely severe, life-threatening, and psychotic forms of the disease.

The creative significance of the tension and reconciliation of naturally occurring, opposite emotional and cognitive states in artists with manic-depressive illness or cyclothymia its milder temperamental variant, and the use of art by artists to heal themselves, are examined as well.

They also can be misleading in their treatment implications, as illustrated by the shift of cyclothymia from a personality disorder, which is theoretically unresponsive to biologic treatment, to a mood disorder, which is theoretically responsive to biologic treatment.